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this is good and I hope this puts a lot of the drama in the rearview mirror. younger developers coming across Ruby must be like "wtf" about this situation. very

• brightball 11mo ago
  He's also in a bit of a unique situation because of his public political profile was essentially forced. - Politics at work were becoming a huge problem at 37Signals - They asked that politics be kept out of company chats, but encouraged people to be political active on non-work channels/social media/etc even during work hours - People lost their minds at this incredibly reasonable request which then blew up on the internet - They offered any employee 6 months severance if they weren't comfortable with the new policy. About 1/3 of the company took it. - Rails Conf dis-invited the creator of Rails - Obviously, this was not going to sit well as people were trying to create a very public political flex against DHH and at that point, he started getting much more vocal about the problem of politics sweeping into every aspect of life. In the following years... - DHH becomes very publicly outspoken against politics infecting everything - 37 Signals publishes another successful book - Ships much more quickly as all of the people constantly distracted by politics at work are no longer in the building - Starts the Rails World conference to great success - Rails Conf shuts down - DHH ships Omarchy which is getting significant support So the end result has been that a bunch of people tried to essentially "cancel" DHH and the result was him having virtually non-stop, resounding success while publicly speaking out against those who created the problem in the first place...because some people really do just want to build cool things regardless of your politics.
  • busterarm 11mo ago
    Good summary. Also the ask for politics to be kept out of company chats is often what I find cited as the _core_ reason for why "DHH is a Nazi" in online discussions. It's _weird_. I think the real root of peoples' disagreement over what happened there is that rank-and-file employees wanted to assert a lot more control over what their company does than they actually could and they were informed that that wouldn't be acceptable. The six month severance was generous.
    • mijoharas 11mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622861
  • wbronitsky 11mo ago
    I don't know how this fits into the narrative you just posted, but DHH was a keynote speaker at RailsConf this year. I was there and heard him speak. He didn't speak about anything "political"; just his usual ranting and raving, this time about how long it takes to test and deploy things.
    • blasphemers 11mo ago
      He was brought back for the last RailsConf since DHH started RailsWorld after he was removed as a speaker for previous conferences.
  • BADBEEF 11mo ago
    I am shocked, SHOCKED, to know that a person who loves to program and just wants to do it would be more productive than people bikeshedding about code of conduct and other matters ;)
  • itsnowandnever 11mo ago
    he's definitely disingenuous, though. I think the "cancel" situation was cringe but the guy posts nativist musings about London and then acts apolitical. look, I get it. the first large generation of professional developers that came up in the web 2.0 era are getting older now so naturally many are becoming more conservative. but a lot of this comes across as some kind of backlash because these guys aren't "cool" anymore. there'd be a lot less drama in this situation in particular if DHH didn't act like he needs the approval of 26 year olds. they're never going to see eye to eye with him because he's an old man at this point so he should have some tact and be the bigger person if he cares about the dev community he was a part of. very similar situation to Musk who used to be adored around the world and now he's seen as a basket case.
  • blibble 11mo ago
    I more or less agree with the "no politics at work" stance but you've omitted his recent "contributions", where he went completely off the rails have a read of this https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 it's completely unacceptable, and he's promoting a self proclaimed fascist white nationalist (Tommy Robinson)
    • dash2 11mo ago
      That's not quite accurate. Quoting chatGPT, since it may have more credible neutrality than my own opinion: """ Does Tommy Robinson call himself a "fascist" or "white nationalist"? No — Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) does not call himself a fascist or white nationalist. He consistently rejects those labels, describing himself instead as a patriot, free-speech activist, or anti-Islamist campaigner. To summarize the record: * Public statements: Robinson has said things like “I’m not a racist, I’m not a fascist — I’m a working-class lad from Luton who’s standing up for my country.” In interviews (e.g., BBC Panorama, ITV, and various YouTube appearances), he has explicitly denied being a fascist or white nationalist. * Affiliations: He co-founded the English Defence League (EDL), which has been widely described by journalists and researchers as far-right and anti-Muslim. However, he left the EDL in 2013 saying it had become associated with racism and extremist elements he could no longer control. """ Maybe TR is a fascist or white nationalist, but he isn't a self-proclaimed one.
      • zahlman 11mo ago
        I don't know why you were downvoted for this. The term "self-proclaimed" does actually mean something in English and is not just an intensifier.
      • mijoharas 11mo ago
        I mean, even if you grant that the EDL is not a fascist organisation (I don't) he was a member of the BNP which is an explicitly fascist organisation, so at best he is a former fascist or a reformed fascist.
    • unethical_ban 11mo ago
  • basisword 11mo ago
    I disagree. DHH said no politics at work. I thought that was great. A sensible moderate position at a time where people were getting polarised. Then he started a blog, built on his companies software, where he constantly shares extreme political opinions. When you are the public face of a company (and framework) and you are publishing your political opinions using your companies platform, you are now bringing politics to work. He’s a hypocrite.
    • itsnowandnever 11mo ago
      right, that's exactly what he did. "politics for me but not for thee"
      • blasphemers 11mo ago
        That's not the case at all. His blog is his personal blog, not 37Signals, and he has never said employees were not allowed to share political opinions outside of work.
        • basisword 11mo ago
          When you're the public face of a company you don't get to separate your personal political blogs from your work life. Your employees shouldn't know your political opinions and when you're that much in the public eye that means keeping them to yourself.
          • zahlman 11mo ago
            I genuinely don't understand why you believe this. Were you holding Bill Gates to the same standard when he still ran Microsoft? A charitable foundation is inherently political (it asserts the importance of the causes it financially supports, and holds them to represent matters of significant moral weight); should he not have put his and his wife's name on it?
        • Barrin92 11mo ago
          this is in the same category as "the law in its majestic equality forbids both beggars and rich men to sleep under bridges". DHH advocates "no politics at work" because as a powerful guy that's organized politics potentially directed at him. He advocates blogging because he knows perfectly well that he has a large audience and his employees or critics don't. That's why the rich tech bro class loves getting politics out of the workplace and getting it onto the platforms they own.
  • ergocoder 11mo ago
    DHH is at worst in the middle between left and right in the political spectrum. Keeping politics out of work place is like an extremely mild stance. For some reason, people label him as facist...
    • brightball 11mo ago
      The label is meaningless now because it's been so over used. At this point a facist is anyone to the right of anarcho-communism. People still trying to use the term are labeling themselves more than anybody else.
      • mijoharas 11mo ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622861
        • brightball 11mo ago
          Case in point https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1979601199927083373?s=46 https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1979601199927083373?s=46
    • mijoharas 11mo ago
      I don't think that's fair, I mostly thought that until I read his recent blog post[0] where he wished for fewer non-white people in London and praises a far-right fascist figure in England (Tommy Robinson, he was a member of the BNP[1] for while before he started the EDL which was more extreme). When you're advocating for ethno-nationalism and praising fascists, I don't think you can get mad at people thinking maybe you're a little bit fascist, or can claim to be in the centre politically. [0] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party
      • ergocoder 11mo ago
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  But how does this solve anything? People will still not trust Ruby Central. And rubygems.org is under control by Ruby Central, even IF ruby core tries to jump in to the rescue.
  • mijoharas 11mo ago
    Well, now there's gem.coop, and we don't have to worry about bundler/gem becoming hostile to other services so either: gem.coop matures and people move to it Or ruby central gets their crap together and regains some trust. It's definitely a win that the tool entry point is now managed by competent people with a good track record that aren't involved in the current drama.
• zahlman 11mo ago
  > making your politics known and then being like "but you're not allowed to have an opinion on it" As far as I can tell, this doesn't fairly reflect what actually happened. Ruby users were free to keep their own political views to their own blogs, just as DHH does. Reading world dot hey dot com slash dhh is not in any way required in order to use Ruby, participate in the development of Ruby or anything else along those lines. There are a lot of prominent developers in the Python community whose politics I strongly disagree with. I got banned from the main discussion forum as a result of objecting to hidden Code of Conduct enforcement principles which (in my view) attempted to bring (many of) those politics in through the back door. (And in the process of getting into that meta argument, and doing research, I encountered several previous unpleasant incidents on the forum and on the mailing list that preceded it.) But I would never start arguments with people in that space over things they wrote on their blogs. I would not go onto, say, the CPython issue tracker to complain about how certain people needed to be removed from the project because of things they said in their own spaces (like we saw with, for example, Opalgate). If I wanted to talk about someone else's politics — or my own — I would and could use my own blog for that. The mere fact of people knowing DHH's politics emphatically does not politicize Ruby, Rails or any related project. To the extent that Python development has become politicized, that's a consequence of actual enacted policy, not the political beliefs of steering committee members, PSF board members etc. DHH putting this content on his blog was part of the effort to have it not in the workplace. And, in point of fact, that does keep it out of 37Signals board rooms.